Chronicle Publishing Company

The Chronicle

What would become Chronicle Publishing Company was formed on January 16, 1865, when teenage brothers Charles and Michael Henry "M. H." de Young published the first edition of the Daily Dramatic Chronicle, a venture funded by a borrowed $20 gold piece. The paper began with a circulation of two thousand readers daily, which tripled within six months as the paper gained readership in the wake of its breaking the news of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to San Francisco. In September 1868, the paper changed its name to the Morning Chronicle.

Over the coming decades, the Chronicle saw massive growth alongside that of San Francisco, weathering the 1880 assassination of Charles de Young in the Chronicle offices. In 1890, the company built the (Old) Chronicle Building, a ten-story building at Kearny and Market Streets that was at the time the tallest building in the western United States, as well as the first to use steel framing. That building was superseded by the final company headquarters, still used by the Chronicle, which were built in 1924 at Fifth and Mission Streets.

With the diversification of interests in the 1960s, the corporation owning the Chronicle was spun off into its own unit as Chronicle Publishing to signify a diversification of its interests outside of San Francisco. The second century of the company began in 1965 with the Chronicle's entering a joint operating agreement with the rival The San Francisco Examiner in which the Chronicle would publish in the mornings while The Examiner published in the afternoons.

Broadcasting

With the growth of television in the 1940s, Chronicle Publishing Company decided to diversify into that medium by applying for a construction permit for a television station that would be operated alongside the Chronicle. On November 5, 1949, CPC would sign on KRON-TV on VHF channel 4, which became the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) affiliate for the San Francisco Bay Area television market. This was much to the chagrin of NBC itself, which was a runner-up for the station and would desire KRON for the next half-century. In the 1950s, KRON would add an FM radio station (KRON-FM, now under call sign KOIT) at 96.5 MHz.

Further diversification into broadcasting came in 1975 when the sale of KRON-FM to Bonneville International allowed CPC to purchase the Meredith Corporation's WOWT-TV in Omaha, Nebraska. This was followed in 1979 with the purchase of KAKE-TV in Wichita, Kansas and in 1987 when independently owned KLBY in Colby, Kansas was purchased to increase KAKE's reach.

Outside the broadcast realm, Chronicle Publishing owned cable systems in California, Hawaiʻi, and New Mexico for several years under their Western Communications unit before those systems were sold to Tele-Communications Inc. in 1995. In the early 1990s, Chronicle Publishing launched the Bay TV cable network which was operated in conjunction with KRON and was seen on most cable systems in the Bay Area.